Review of The Last Bolshevik

Taking his cue from a citation of George Steiner to the effect that it is not history that we remember ("was eigenlich geschehen ist"), but the images of that past time, Marker has taken liberties with the official images of the Soviet era to construct a montage that takes pot shots at the rift between the official images of the USSR and the reality. Easy enough to do, but this hardly illuminates the historical truth about the circumstances under which an attempt was made to fulfill the dreams of Bolsheviks like Medvedkin--namely to raise, in little more than a blink of the eye, the cultural and material standard of living of the degraded and oppressed peasantry and proletariat of Czarist Russia. In a sense, his homage to Medvedkin ends up demeaning the utopian spirit of the latter and reduces, perhaps unwittingly, Medvedkin's endeavors to something foolhardy and ingenuous at best.